2024-03-04 - Feature Request - General link

jpservices · 2024-05-09T06:45:38.701Z

This looks exciting and also progressing. However there have been multiple discussions on topics I assume to be similar. Will this bring the implementation of x-callback URL on android and iOS? Or will there be an other format? I have been using such a scheme on Android from different apps like Evernote or Sygic and my links looked like:

evernote:///view/note book id/note id
com.sygic.aura://coordinate!6.0!40.0!show where ! is the pipe sign

Could not find something similar for Joplin though. Will the feature worked and bring such ability to open a note from any other mobile app? Or do I miss something?

Thanks for the great work anyhow.

Coffee · 2024-06-05T17:06:07.109Z

muzak:

This is already being worked

@muzak @laurent
What does your gut feeling tell you, from which version this function could be available for the first time?

Coffee · 2024-07-05T08:04:33.860Z

Coffee:

@muzak @laurent
What does your gut feeling tell you, from which version this function could be available for the first time?

muzak · 2024-07-05T17:55:50.585Z

With release android-v3.0.5 and later, the Android app can now handle callback URLs. When you click on an external link in an app that isn't Joplin, the associated note is opened in Joplin.

Coffee · 2024-07-06T10:02:19.110Z

muzak:

Android app can now handle callback URLs

Thank you for this status update, @muzak .

If I use an external link like
joplin://x-callback-url/openNote?id=2a8daf4b6632429ebf104c68ee673de7
from the Windows app and forward it to Android via WhatsApp, I can manually copy this external link to a browser ( e.g. Firefox ) on Android and "send" it. This procedure takes me to the correct note in Joplin 3.0.7 (prod, android).

Unfortunately, the operating system does not recognise this external link as a link, so that I cannot click on it directly. This is too complicated for the people I want to work with efficiently via Joplin.

Is there already a coordinated plan for how to achieve this, so that even technically inexperienced users can click on such a link directly in WhatsApp, for example?

2024-07-06 externer Link nicht anklickbar

muzak · 2024-07-06T15:00:19.231Z

Apps I tested recognized external links as links. Clicking them opened the associated note in Joplin.

I don't know why WhatsApp or any other app shows the external link as text. This sounds like a question for those specific apps.

If other Joplin Cloud users click links (not text) that don't open the associated note in Joplin, using the share notebook feature could fix that.

Coffee · 2024-07-06T21:10:57.728Z

muzak:

I don't know why WhatsApp or any other app shows the external link as text.

I am an end user and customer of Joplin Cloud Team - I am not familiar with such details. Could it be that it's about the following specialty that I just stumbled across in a quick Google search

Android Developers

配置、实现和验证 Android App Links | Android Developers

在此 Codelab 中，您将构建一个列出一系列餐馆的 Android 应用。该课程旨在协助您设计、配置和验证 Android App Links。

grafik1904×912 96.1 KB

roman_r_m · 2024-07-07T15:18:01.853Z

Coffee:

Is there already a coordinated plan for how to achieve this, so that even technically inexperienced users can click on such a link directly in WhatsApp, for example?

I may be wrong but I think in order for this to work it needs to be supported by WhatsApp. Without this I don't think it's possible.
Do you know of any similar links (i.e. not http/HTTPS) working there?

Coffee · 2024-07-10T15:50:55.037Z

roman_r_m:

I may be wrong but I think in order for this to work it needs to be supported by WhatsApp. Without this I don't think it's possible.
Do you know of any similar links (i.e. not http/HTTPS) working there?

If none of you experts can say whether it is possible to teach an Android to pass a link like
joplin://x-callback-url/openNote?id=ebcd30d052bb46bbb87353beeda96089
to the Joplin app, I suggest a solution in combination with a web server / API in your infrastructure.

Let's say you have a small web application installed under a URL like
https://RedirectJoplin.joplincloud.com
which receives the external link as a parameter via a call like
https://RedirectJoplin.joplincloud.com?joplin://x-callback-url/openNote?id=ebcd30d052bb46bbb87353beeda96089
The web server / API takes this parameter, generates a redirect from it and sends it back to the calling device.

In this example,
joplin://x-callback-url/openNote?id=ebcd30d052bb46bbb87353beeda96089
would be passed to the browser installed there, which would use this value to open the Joplin application installed there. In principle, this solution works on both Windows and Android, and should work on other operating systems as well. I have created a small PoC with a static index.html using this link and have just tested it successfully. The PoC link
https://nodecaffcoff-2023.de/2024-07-10-PoC-GeneralLink
takes me to the desired note on both my Windows PC and my Android.

The index.html has the following content

<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=joplin://x-callback-url/openNote?id=ebcd30d052bb46bbb87353beeda96089">
</head>

<body>
</body>

</html>

james-carroll · 2024-07-10T15:54:47.033Z

I use this client side JS at work.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Redirect Service</title>
        <script>
            var URI = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search).get("target");
            if (URI) {
                window.location.replace(URI);
            }
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>This page should not be visible.</p>
        <p>It may be that the "target" parameter is missing, or that JavaScript is not being executed.</p>
    </body>
</html>

P.S it's been 3 years and I still haven't fixed the fact it doesn't properly handle multiple parameters, this is "left as an exercise to the reader". (More like I wrote it in 5 minutes and coding isn't my job, so it works for them and I never bothered since).

We used it because Power BI wouldn't let us call anything other than HTTP/HTTPS links, so instead we throw unsupported links at a page that will open them if Microsoft won't.

roman_r_m · 2024-07-10T20:20:18.838Z

This is clever! I suppose you can even host it on something like github for free.

benlau · 2024-07-11T04:48:21.509Z

I did something similar in a project called IAnyLink

3rdparty Universal Web Link Apps

Hi all, I would like to share my project here: IAnyLink - GitHub - benlau/l: App Link to Universal Web Link Although Joplin supports external app links, these links may not be recognized by other website services or applications. For example, if you paste the link in Notion, Google Keep, etc., it is not clickable, and you can't use it to open a local note in Joplin quickly. IAnylink is a solution designed to solve this issue. It turns your app link into a regular web link, making it recogniza…

Coffee · 2024-07-11T14:59:49.853Z

benlau:

I did something similar in a project called IAnyLink

Great! That's excellent.

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Coffee · 2024-08-07T10:12:13.560Z

muzak:

With release android-v3.0.5 and later, the Android app can now handle callback URLs.

Since the "callback URLs" introduced with Android 3.0.5 are not yet easy enough to use on their own, I would like to maintain my feature request - general link.
I would like Joplin to offer a solution like the one presented by @benlau .

james-carroll · 2024-08-07T10:29:12.592Z

If Joplin were to host this as a project, I'd heavily encourage using my Client Side JS above.

It's a minimal text file that can be hosted on a CDN, it's entirely stateless, with no databases or services running beyond the HTTP server itself. That means that yes, Github Pages can host it entirely for free, that's how I originally used it (except in work itself, where its on our own domain/Apache2).

The end result is the same but the technical implementation is significantly different, a 1KB text file in a Git repo that hasn't changed once in 3 years is hard to beat.

Yes there's one minor known defect (that doesn't even effect the Joplin URLs), if that is problematic for Joplin, it's likely significantly easier to work around it than to rearchitect the whole thing.

Coffee · 2024-08-28T15:20:23.178Z

james-carroll:

If Joplin were to host this as a project, I'd heavily encourage using my Client Side JS above.

@laurent , what is your opinion of @james-carroll 's approach?

Coffee · 2024-09-16T14:43:14.280Z

I still hope that Joplin will do it.

tiberiusteng · 2024-09-24T15:50:11.447Z

It's possible to implement what called "App Links" by Android and called "Universal Links" by iOS; @Coffee has linked to the Android development docs on that.

The idea is that every note have a canonical URL that could possibly be opened in an ordinary browser (but it doesn't need to), and if user installed Joplin app, the app can intercept those URLs and open it in the app.

So we could probably have note URLs like:
https://joplincloud.com/note/ebcd30d052bb46bbb87353beeda96089

and configure Joplin app to intercept https://joplincloud.com/note/* and open the corresponding note in the app.

joplincloud.com will need to serve two files to explicitly express that it allow specified app to intercept links to it: /.well-known/assetlinks.json for Android, /apple-app-site-association for iOS, each containing specified app ID/package name and signing certificate's hash.

The issue would be that every user trying to open notes with those URLs will hit joplincloud.com to obtain the association file, and probably will hit those canonical note URLs if user haven't installed the app, intentionally testing it, or unintentionally shared the link.

Those URLs on the server probably need to display a descriptive page saying that these URLs can only be opened in Joplin, probably provide a link to install the app. Serving these files/pages could incur additional cost. And it could have privacy issues too, as the server is possible to get user's IP and the note's IDs they trying to open.

So ... yes, technically it's doable. But it has additional administrative cost on the website need to consider.

james-carroll · 2024-09-24T19:01:06.475Z

Coffee:

@laurent , what is your opinion of @james-carroll 's approach?

Considering mine with the ability to integrate the mobile apps a bit more; I'd imagine a revised approach would be:

Use App Links as described by Tib as the primary solution, due to the better UX
Keep the core concept of the universal link idea but ammend the logic to work on Anchors rather than URL Parameters, for situations the above doesn't work.
2.1) Add a huge "Install/Open Joplin" button, to cover people who don't have it installed at all. Unfortunately I don't think this covers people without JS.

tiberiusteng:

as the server is possible to get user's IP and the note's IDs they trying to open.

So I'm no web tech, but from what I've seen in e.g Bitwarden or Protonmail, the browser doesn't send anchors as part of the HTTP payload, so hypothetically e.g:

joplincloud.com/redirect#noteID

Is all you need.

Unlike my (original) example, we know the target is always joplin://, so there's no point including it and making it impossible for malicious users to change it to e.g steam:// is a huge win.

And secondly, the server doesn't recieve the note ID at all, even in any HTTP logs, becuase the browser physically never sends the NoteID to the server.

So following, it's still stateless and cheap, since it's all client side logic (all files including the App Link JSON files are static).

Coffee · 2024-10-18T08:26:39.071Z

Coffee:

I still hope that Joplin will do it.

I still have hope that Joplin will do it.